Chapters 3 and 4
Chapter 3 Summary * Jem found Scout rubbing Walter Cunningham’s nose in dirt in their schoolyard * Jem invited Walter back to their house for dinner as he looked so malnourished because their fathers were both friends * Jem calls Boo Radley a “hain’t” – a ghost, the word is Southern colloquialism * Jem became not afraid of the Radley household and instead boasted to Walter about how he ‘went all the way up to the house once’ * Atticus and Walter talked together “like two men” about farming * Scout insulted how Walter was eating his food and Calpurnia harshly told her off – Scout says “he’s just a Cunningham” * Scout blamed Calpurnia for getting her into trouble as school because she had taught her to write * In school, Miss Caroline sees a “cootie” crawl out of Burris Ewell’s hair and tries to send him home but the other students explain that he wouldn’t come back anyway after the first day of school because he was a Ewell * Scout, by the end of the day, was certain that she didn’t want to go back to school because she would have to not read or write for nine months, but Atticus insisted she did with the compromise that they would read together every night but she wouldn’t tell Miss Caroline Key Quotations Atticus tells scout: “First of all if you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view”''' ''Scout interrupts with “Sir?” then Atticus continues “- until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” -Sense of foreshadowing with Boo Radley -Shows how professional Atticus is – probably due to his job Context Class distinctions: Scout is told off by Calpurnia because she is thinking of Walter Cunningham and Burris Ewell differently due to the professions of their families. Other school children say that these students are e.g. "Just a Ewell" which indicates that they are not thought of as individual people but as just a part of their whole family. It is also assumed that they will follow in the footsteps of their family as everyone expects Burris Ewell to only come into school for the first day as other people in his family did. Chapter 4 Summary * Scout had been running past the Radley Place every day after school however one day she decided to investigate after she notices something * She sees some tinfoil stuck to a knothole in a tree at the edge of the Radley front yard * Inside the hole she finds two pieces of chewing gum and tries some firstly to check it’s not poisonout and then takes it home * Jem makes her spit it out and gargle because he says that you’re “not supposed to even touch the trees over there? You’ll get killed if you do!” * Finally it is summer and they find another piece of tinfoil contained two Indian-head pennies in the same knothole * Dill arrives and says he can smell death and he also tells Scout that her end is nigh * Jem mocks Dill and Scout for being (or pretending to be) superstitious * Whilst the three of them are playing a game Scout rolls into the Radley front yard in a tire and then Jem invents a new game in which they act out the life story of Boo Radley as they think it goes * Atticus does not fully approve of this game but he does not forbid it * The reader is then, at the end of the chapter, told that when Scout ended up in the Radley front yard that she heard someone inside laughing Key Quotations Page 39: “something” “something” “some tinfoil” -ambiguity “well, Indian-heads – well, they come from the Indians. They’re real strong magic, they make you have good luck” -sense of foreboding “Someone inside the house was laughing” -laughing is portrayed as being eerie and like an allusion to when the ‘bad’ character in a fairytale ‘cackles’Category:To Kill a Mockingbird